It is the throne of reason, the foundation of prudence: by its means success is gained at little cost... Discretion consists in a natural tendency to the most rational course, combined with a liking for the surest.
Baltasar Gracián, 1647 (tr. Joseph Jacobs, 1892)
It is ranked above every glamorous faculty: not brilliance, not courage, not charm, but discretion, defined with beautiful plainness as a tendency toward the rational course and a liking for the sure one. Notice the words tendency and liking: not a technique applied on big occasions but a standing direction of the whole person, operating in the hundred small choices where nobody is watching and no single stake seems high. Its signature is that success arrives at little cost: the discreet person is rarely rescuing himself, because he rarely needed rescue. The faculty can be built, mostly by borrowing: asking, before choices small and large, one unfashionable question. What would the most sensible person I know do here?
Practice
- Install the sensible-person question as a habit on daily choices; discretion is trained in the small sizes and then fits the large.
- Develop the liking for the sure: let the solid option feel like taste, not like defeat; the thrill-need is what discretion replaces.
- Watch your rescue frequency; a life needing regular saves is running low on this faculty, whatever else it runs high on.
Use this when
- Use this as the default setting, which is the entire point; discretion is a direction, not an occasion.
- Use it doubly where your other gifts are loud; talent without this throne, the book says elsewhere, is exactly how monsters and wrecks are made.
Ignore this when
- Don't let the liking for the surest forbid every calculated risk; the rational course sometimes IS the bold one, fully priced (maxim 91's midday light).
- Don't mistake timidity for discretion; one avoids all exposure, the other selects it. The difference is a stated reason.
A picture of it
Nobody ever told a story about him, which was the story. While colleagues starred in cycles of crisis and heroics, his files closed on time, his loans were the boring kind, his exits from souring situations happened a year before the souring made news. At his farewell, a younger officer asked his secret, hoping for a doctrine. The old man considered honestly and offered the only one he had: at every fork, he had asked what the most sensible man he knew would do, and then done that, even when it bored him. Especially when it bored him.
Drama is a symptom. Discretion is the health that never generates the story.